User blog:Manapot3/Mana's VC Blog 2
Hello everyone, Manapot here again and today marks my 3rd month into the game. Just posting another blog with updates and my thoughts so far. You can find my previous one in the archive. Currently my highest rating is 164, my level is 106, and still running strong against the current field law with 3 unleashers (GUR oracles) and 2 light buffers (chocolate candy and teatime) usually manage 20mil+ damage. Possibly more with atk down but longer fight. Null would be useful too, but I don’t have any. After testing the waters with alliance battle (win rate of 90-95%+) and archwitch top 300 rankings, I have different views about the game now going into endgame VC. I’m going to list out some of the key things I am disappointed about and few of the good things. As we know, games generally improve over time so I do hope Mynet is able to address some of my concerns. Before I start with my wall of text, I would like to begin by saying this is my opinion about this game and not the collective opinion of the gamers. I am a high caliber strategic player in this game and every other game I play. I also lead and moderate medium to large size alliances/groups in my previous and current games so I have a decent understanding about the general player base. Here are the key items I want to discuss, will try to be concise (See below for TL;DR): 1) 1) Using jewels to recover soldiers: Usually after a defeat as a new player, you are given the option to recover your soldiers to fight again for 100 jewels. The way the button is positioned makes it possible for careless players to accidently use it when tapping their phones. I think most players would agree this is a useless function and only serves to trap or annoy players. 2) 2) Alliance battle schedule: To my understanding this game is global, meaning you have people all over the world. Shouldn’t these battles be more tailored towards that so you don’t have people in certain regions who needs to wake up middle of the night? Suggestion: Set up a different alliance battle system that is fair for player with different time zones. Perhaps battles can last 24 hours but you can only recover maximum of 64 bp (equal to 4 full rounds) and using rods does not affect that recovery. I’m sure there could be better ideas for this. 3) 3) Ranking rewards: I came from similar card games and in my opinion the ranking rewards needs a lot of work. Here is the breakdown: a. SR summon ticket: I don’t understand why this is not SR or above ticket, it’s almost useless to high rankers who only use GUR cards. Simply put, there is no incentive finishing in the top 10 than finishing in the top 300. b. This game doesn’t have trading and your endgame team revolves around having GUR cards. Only top 300 of each event will be able to get a GUR copy of the ranking reward. Shouldn't the brackets be bigger especially when you supposedly have millions of players? Although I would estimate active player base to be closer to 20k which is same with most card games. c. The ranking tiers makes no sense to me, especially where the difference between 300-500 and 500-1000 is only an arcana? d. I do like the mid rewards though and they revamped this very nicely so I will have to give them this. 4) 4) Chat system: There is currently no way of contacting other players in this game. Friends is the reason why most people play and continue playing games. If you don’t provide a way for players to network other than relying on searching the web for unofficial forums, then they may not have the best experience. Edit: Along side the chat system, would be interesting if you can directly attack other players and maybe get resources if you win? From what I see it the dueling system is still primitive and has a lot of potential. 5) 5) New player experience: This is the most important criticism I have and will be broken down into several sections. I feel like this game have an issue with keeping active players and attracting new players. I met a lot of players and friends who started out about the same time I did and they all have similar complaint with the game. Going to list one at a time: a) Starting out: So new guy starts out usually have no clue how witches work or anything for that matter. But assuming he finds the unofficial wiki website that players worked so hard to put together, he hits a stone wall. By this I mean advancing to the point where you can enjoy various aspects of the game. I believe FAW should be obtainable for average players to get each event. But this is not really the case. For a new player to get a FAW, he must first obtain a deck full of buffers to kill AW efficiently. Then they must secure an active alliance/comrades to help kill FAWs. With FAW drops being nonexistent as a sender or killer for that matter, they must fill the heart as RNG. Then obtain HSR of the lesser 2 Archwitches to do Amalgation. All these obstacles makes it unfeasible for any average player to get the foothold they need to advance in this game in a reasonable amount of time. Most of them will just give up and quit after they see how much effort they spent and still can’t get a FAW. I’ve seen quite a lot quit for this reason myself. My sub account is also struggling to build a solid AW deck after playing actively for 3 months just because I missed out on a FAW buffer and there haven’t been any others. I imagine this to be a hurdle that most new players can’t get over. b) Card cycling: Part of this ties into starting out as a new player. Each event the FAW/LAW features a different skill. If you require a certain skill you must wait X amount of event until it comes again. This is especially distressing when you need X card in order to fight a LAW or start killing FAWs for example. You also need a certain type of card for rankings ie multi hitters. c) Endgame VC: I feel like the cards in this game have one major flaw. They’re all identical cards with different art. Each new event or summon is more or less a reskin of previous cards, adding more to the card pool. For summon cards, it's very difficult for players to obtain 2 copies of the same card unless they dish out a lot of money or summon tickets. For event cards, this makes it pointless for veterans to continue collecting cards once they have their desired skill aside from collection purposes. So most people are just on hiatus until a good looking card is available. This is partially due to the fact you can max stats using arcana and soldier count isn't very important. d) Trading: Needless to say, there is no trading in this game. This is good and bad. Good that the game isn’t ruined by bots or money sellers. Bad in the sense that it’s just so difficult to obtain more than 1 copy of a card in order to obtain the final evolution. The large card pool in premium and ultimate summons along with the tight top 300 ranking for witch and 500 for alliance battle to get 2 copies for final form makes the game less appealing to those who can’t compete for those ranks or spend a lot of money. As I mentioned earlier, this game revolves around GUR deck endgame afterall. e) The randomness of Law/Faw drop: I been through several events now and I rarely let my BP cap so I think I can say with 95% confidence that the drop rates for these cards can be extremely terrible. Given that the average player plays a lot less than me, it would be nearly impossible for them to get a GUR law. I also seen a lot of people quit last event because they couldn’t get a celestial oracle. And believe me, they just had bad rng it wasn’t that they didn’t fight enough LAWs or deal enough damage. I got 9 drops with 62 oracle encounters and I know peope who killed similar with higher average damage with 0 drops other than heart. 6) 6) Jewel summons and related items: a. In my opinion, this game is the pretty generous that it gives you jewel rewards just playing the game. Although the rate is not great, it allows f2p players to somewhat reach p2w players given enough time. I really do enjoy this aspect of the game where I can collect jewels from login and completing event maps. b. However, since jewels aren’t that difficult to save up, the game must counterbalance that with inflation. In this sense, you things like summons costing more than it normally would. I've seen plenty of players who spent $320 for a switch box GUR summon. In my opinion this is very steep for just one card that may be reskinned in the future, I believe similar games you could get something with $50-100 where more people would be more comfortable spending. This isn't a clear pro or con, but something to think about. Just to summarize as a TL;DR version: 1) Remove noobie traps like recover soldiers. 2) Change alliance battle schedule to be more suited towards international audience 3) Revamp the ranking rewards and consider expanding the cutoffs (only 300 players can get GUR ranking reward each event). 4) Implement a chat system for players 5) Overhaul the card system so new players can more easily access all of the game. 6) Jewel reward in this game is awesome but makes things inflated. Category:Blog posts